Secrets Kept

By Terry R Barca

More than two years in the making. The sequel to KEEPER OF SECRETS. The continuing adventures of Daisy and her granddaughter Susan. Daisy's diaries inspire Susan to lead a secret life of adventure. Money, danger and a sense of freedom drive Susan. Daisy became a spy because her country needed her -- Susan steals secrets because she wants to. These women, living in different centuries, are connected by the mysterious Keeper of Secrets.
Find out why Backdoor Barry prefers the dingy pub in Richmond as his office. Discover how Boris the barman fits into tight spaces. Learn the secret that Susan's neighbour wants to be kept hidden. Will the time traveller return from who knows where? Will Susan's typing skills keep her out of trouble? Does Daisy succeed in paying back her debt to the deadly Canadians? Is Precious enough for Terry or will he fall for the widowed librarian?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terry R Barca
• Release date: Jul 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463720752

Terry R Barca

I’m an author who lives and works in the Dandenong Ranges, on the eastern edge of Melbourne Australia.I take one day at a time but occasionally I’m attacked by several days at once.My amazing wife and I have lived in The Hills for forty-three years.My favourite colour is green and so is my favourite car.I started my working life as a Primary School Teacher in the early 1970s.Since then I have been a stained glass craftsman, furniture restorer, restorer of Player Pianos and music rolls, author (twenty one books so far, seventeen audiobooks, another on the way), photographer, basketball trading card manufacturer, basketball coach, basketball player, basketball referee, part-time shop assistant, newspaper columnist, homeschool dad, husband, father, grandfather, and a few other bits and pieces, and not in this order.I’m fascinated by people, but I prefer the company of dogs.I’m not frightened of dying, but sometimes life scares the hell out of me.I think that birds are cool but I don’t believe that they spend any time thinking about me, even though I give them lots of stale bread, and the occasional pizza crust........ ungrateful bastards!

Book preview

Other Books by Terry R Barca

Schoome

The Long Weekend

Passerby

Loyal and True

Trust

Slightly Spooky Stories

Red Wheelbarrow

Rufus

Keeper of Secrets

Bullet To The Heart — Sam Bennett’s Case Files

Dot, Dot, Dot …

No Through Road

The Road Leads Home

Dedication

To Dianne, who reads my words and warms my heart.

"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."

— Roald Dahl

Introduction

John Le Carre believed that History keeps its secrets longer than most, but even History reveals them eventually.

My grandmother, Daisy, waited a lifetime before revealing hers.

I found her diaries and her mysterious rag doll and the finding of them changed my life.

Lewis Carroll felt that the secret to life was doing for others. I understand what he meant, but for me, the secret to life is living for me and making sure the ones I love — the ones that I do for — never find out.

This is my adventure — my life.

I have no desire for fame and glory, that is for other more insecure souls, and this is where my grandmother and I come closely together. She kept her life a secret from most of the people who knew her, especially her family. She did it all for King and country.

I, on the other hand, do it for Susan.

I could have let all of my adventures drift away, never to be spoken of, but I share the same need as every woman — my greatest desire is to be understood.

I imagined that some day, one of my decendents — possibly a female — would come across my journals and read them with the same gusto that I read my grandmother’s memories.

If I am lucky, you will understand me and why I lived the life I lived.

Bill Firth

As sad neighbours go, Bill Firth is probably my favourite.

He tried to kiss me once, and I didn’t slap his face.

He mistook me for his dead wife, and I took his drunken misunderstanding as a compliment.

His Mary was someone special, and I’m not just saying that because she is dead. To most people, she would have been unremarkable, but to Bill, she was THE one. He built his whole life around her and their children. He worked all the hours that God sent him, even to the point of not going to the U.S. for a planned trip to Disneyland. His business was starting to take off, so he stayed home to secure their future.

Bill’s family died in a desert in California — a domestic plane crash, and his future came to a screaming halt.

As with all things American, the airline paid out an enormous amount of money to the survivors, as though money would make it all better. The almighty dollar.

Bill bought the biggest house in our tight-knit neighbourhood because that is what his Mary would have wanted — a beautiful big home for the kids to grow up in, except that now there were no children and no Mary to share this enormous house.

I talk about Mary as though we were neighbours, but I never met her. Everything I know came from Bill. Mary and the kids are his favourite subject.

Most of the neighbours stopped listening not long after he moved in. Not long after that, they wished he would move out.

"Why doesn’t he pull himself together? Moping around is not going to bring his family back and why doesn’t he mow his lawns. He makes the whole street look untidy. And those late night parties or whatever they are. The comings and goings, the loud music, the annoying cars at all hours. Why doesn’t he just bugger off and drink himself to death somewhere else and leave us decent people in peace?"

I liked him right from the first moment when I found him sitting among his meagre possessions on the lawn in front of his newly acquired house, just down the block from ours.

He was sitting on a tea chest as the removal men bustled around him.

Hello, I’m Susan. I live just a few doors up there with my husband and our two boys, I said feeling a little uneasy. I’d only stepped out to retrieve the Saturday morning paper from our front lawn when I saw the activity at number fifty-two. Curiosity got the better of me, and as I got closer, I could sense that something wasn’t right.

Oh, hi, said Bill, but he didn’t look up immediately. He was staring at a toy car that had fallen out of one of the boxes.

Bill. Bill Firth, he said somewhat sleepily.

Big day moving into a new house? I said.

I guess, he said, and his eyes went back to the toy.

Is your wife around. I’d like to say hello? I said.

No. It’s just me, he said.

My mind went to divorce, but that didn't feel right. Wisely, I didn’t push him for more information.

You seem to be preoccupied with the big move, so I’ll leave you alone, but if you get hungry after fruitlessly trying to find your cooking utensils, you are very welcome to have dinner with us. It’s the white house with the green door. We eat late on a Saturday but feel free to come early, and my husband will show off his cocktail making ability, he loves an audience, I said as I backed away from this sad, wistful man. He looked as though he had been several kilos heavier when he first bought his jeans and shirt.

I was pleasantly surprised when a neatly dressed Bill Firth turned up at our door a bit before seven o’clock.

Welcome, please come in, I said as he handed me an excellent bottle of McLaren Vale red. It occurred to me that Bill had gotten a head start on us because his breath smelled of grapes — the fermented kind.

He was steady on his feet that night, but this was to be the last time he would be so.

The move to the big new house gave his sorrow more rooms to get around in, but it did not make him happy.

It was going to take Bill Firth a long time to drink himself to death, and the money the airline gave him would mean that he could do it in style. Along the way, he would collect a variety of dubious characters that would happily help him spend his money. As his despair worsened, he would secretly hope that one of these characters would kill him and save him the trouble.

Bill Firth’s sorrow knew no bounds.

On that first night, though, he was sociable and friendly, and I got a glimpse of the man he once was — a family man — which was all he ever wanted to be.

Bill’s determined attempts at drinking himself to death took him to some desperate places. His adventures, some near fatal, were to benefit me ultimately.

It was Bill Firth who introduced me to Backdoor Barry, and he was the gateway to my new life. My grandmother's diaries lit the spark, but it was Bill and Barry that got me started.

As you would expect, Bill was angry and he wanted revenge. The airline company had recently joined the many competitors in the ‘budget flights’ market in Australia, and Bill was sure that they were cutting corners on safety the same way they had in the U.S. He asked around and found Barry and his information gathering services. Bill got what he paid for, but nothing came of it because the subsidiary went broke soon after and the authorities were not interested in chasing them. Another kick in the guts for Bill, but a lucky break for me.

It was also Bill who got me involved with Kenneth South, our neighbour and the only person I have had to kill so far in my new life.

Kenneth used Bill to gather information on me — information he could use to blackmail me. Kenneth made a single mistake — he underestimated me. He saw my soft female exterior and assumed that I would roll over and give him money to keep my secret safe. I might have too, but it rained, and I shot the bastard.

Bill would have been mortified to think that he had brought me pain — I didn’t tell him what had happened — I sorted it and that was enough for me.

Sadly, Bill does not always remember the long conversations we have on sunny afternoons staring at his overgrown backyard. The alcohol takes its toll, and Bill forgets. There is still a general awareness that we spend time together and that it is comforting to him — that’s good enough for me.

Why don’t you let me lend you my gardener, Bill? I’ve said on more than one occasion.

No. I like it wild. I get to see all sorts of creatures crawling around. They wouldn’t come if I cut it all down, Bill would say, and he had a point — a point that was lost on the rest of our neighbours.

I watch the bugs and spiders fight it out. I see the butterflies and the dragonflies and the birds and stuff. It all plays out just for my amusement, and I do my best not to stuff it up. If I sit here quietly, they forget I’m here, and life goes on exactly as it should.

Bill might be perpetually drunk and terminally sad, but he is also wise and wonderful, and I’m proud to know that he counts me as a friend.

How are you getting on with Barry? Is he behaving himself?

Sort of, I say. He is getting me work, and I’m making a lot of money and having a lot of fun, and you absolutely cannot tell anyone — promise? I say, every time we have this conversation. Bill resets every day, so I have to remind him of his promise.

When he first suggested that I meet with Barry he wanted me to be prepared.

You won’t see a poker machine or a clean table, Susan. This is a pub where men come to make deals, plan jobs and to forget about how shitty their lives are. You’ll know Barry when you see him; he’ll be the only bloke in here in a suit. The suit won’t fit him, and it might look like he took it off a dead body, but it’ll definitely be a suit. Barry believes a man should dress to match the occasion. He also believes in drinking heavily, and he likes the ladies, so don’t agree to go home with him, because he doesn’t muck around and he thinks foreplay is a golf shot.

I’m married, Bill. You know that.

I know that you know that, but Barry won’t give a fuck, trust me.

My life is hectic these days, and sometimes I forget to check in with Bill. Fortunately, he is the kind of friend who doesn’t count time — he is happy that I show up, no matter how long it has been.

A Key For Susan

Another bar and another job.

Since my time traveller disappeared, Backdoor Barry has had me on a string of one-off jobs that don’t require a lot of preparation. A day, maybe two, out of my life. My chief qualification for each task being my looks — reasonable tits, and a firm arse and a willingness to do what it takes to get the job done.

As I mentioned, bars feature prominently in my work. My target is invariably a man, except that one time in Canberra — apparently, the Minister for Finance was my type — it was a pleasant change of pace to be seduced by a woman. This was not my first time in the arms of a woman, but the other times were youthful experiments, and I did the choosing. The Finance Minister was a decade older than me, but being in the spotlight had motivated her to please the camera — I work out for two hours every day, and I can crack a walnut between my thighs.

Wouldn’t a nutcracker do the job more efficiently? I said with a smile.

The Minister was a spectacular fuck, but she’d had her sense of humour surgically removed not long after entering politics. I was speaking metaphorically. I don’t crack walnuts with my thighs. Besides, it might leave a bruise. I like my thighs to be unbruised. She had a point, but my eyes were beginning to glaze over. I’d been working on her since I picked her up in the bar at the Royal. Each drink could finance a coup in a small African country, and I’d had three, waiting for her to notice me.

Once she locked eyes on me, we didn’t stay in the bar for very long. The Minister likes to get down to business. I’ve never had a man remove my panties as seductively as this mature woman with the beautiful silky black hair. Her pubic hair had flecks of grey amongst the jet black. Why don’t you dye them as well, I asked out of genuine curiosity.

In my public life, no-one gets to see them, so why bother, and before you ask, I don’t wax because I’m proud of my furry bits. My generation likes to look like a woman, not a little girl. Another good point.

She put her fingers between my legs and gently ran them up and down my secret flesh, only stopping as she arrived at my ‘little man’. Her tender attention was making it difficult to concentrate. I wanted her to fall asleep, so I could go through her bag and access her phone records. As always, I have no idea how Barry procured her lock screen code.

During our torrid encounter, the Minister for Finance, call me Betty, drank half a bottle of Mercier Champagne (I didn’t think it was available in Australia), consumed no drugs, and showed no signs of falling asleep.

As the sun was rising over a sleepy Canberra, my mark finally fell asleep. I lost count of her orgasms at around the fifteen mark, and she was just as generous in her treatment of me. She did things with a feather that I had not seen before, and her moan was something that I will not quickly forget — the people in the next room were either deaf or severely sleep deprived.

I retrieved the information from her phone without her waking, and I kissed her gently on the forehead before I headed for the elevator. She opened her eyes briefly and whispered, Thank you, which made me feel sad.

She was a means to an end — a job, a mark, but she briefly touched my heart and other places as well. In a different world, in another life, I could have been her lover, and I would have enjoyed being a friend to this lovely, driven lady.

My current mark was tall and handsome, and Barry assured me that I was his type. Barry is rarely wrong — he does his homework — meticulousness research. I asked him once how he gathers